The executive order, which radically reshapes the country’s economy, will be enforced for a minimum of two months
President Javier Milei’s controversial executive order reshaping Argentina socially, economically, and politically went into effect on Friday.
Last week, Milei released an 86-page document known as a decree of necessity and urgency (DNU, by its Spanish acronym) that contained 366 articles. The DNU declared a financial, fiscal, and administrative “emergency” in Argentina while mandating widescale deregulation, the repeal of hundreds of laws protecting Argentine workers, and limitations on benefits such as severance pay and maternity leave.
While DNUs are constitutionally required to go through Congress, they are binding until they’re overturned. DNUs only require a simple majority in one of the congressional chambers to become law, although the judiciary has the authority to reject them as well.
Honestly, many of these reforms are urgently needed and long overdue, such as lifting export controls—it’s literally insane that a country facing a shortage of foreign exchange would deliberately crimp its own exports. For these parts, Milei has a pretty good justification for issuing an emergency decree.
The big gamble Milei is taking is to stuff the package with a bunch of lower-priority items that, while arguably needed, are hard to defend as emergency measures. (This is quite similar to what the US government has often done, see e.g. the Inflation Reduction Act.) This increases the risk of the package being voted down, which hasn’t happened before with his predecessors’ decrees.